An Update to New York City’s Largest Borough-Specific Planning Effort
Welcome to The 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn – a roadmap for long-term, equitable growth across the borough. The 2025 Plan offers a deep analysis of existing inequities in the borough and a set of policy priorities that outline a blueprint for ensuring every Brooklynite is healthy, housed, and supported.
What is a Comprehensive Plan?
From London to Lagos, Bogota to São Paulo, major cities across the world have created long-term vision and action plans to guide their growth and development.
These plans outline how land will be used, where investments will be made, and how communities will accommodate growth and change.
Real, thorough, and extensive comprehensive planning is the norm in most major cities in the US and across the globe, yet despite being the most populous city in the country, New York City is noticeably lacking a plan like this.
“The thing about a borough, a neighborhood, a block – it’s not just a geographic location. It’s a gateway to a suite of resources – to schools, to jobs, to trains, buses, healthcare facilities, parks, libraries – all of the things that shape our daily lives and our future possibilities.
And which neighborhoods have opportunity and which don’t – that’s not luck either. It’s public policy; it’s government – it’s layers and layers of decisions that have been made over decades and centuries to create the communities we live in today.”
– Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso
What is The 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn?
Our city is special for many reasons – most of them good. But there is a major way in which our city gets it wrong: planning.
That’s why, in 2023, Borough President Reynoso released his first Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn – the largest, borough-specific planning effort in our city’s history – to address New York’s lack of a citywide plan and chart Brooklyn’s way to a more equitable future.
The 2025 Plan builds on this work, offering an updated guide for the Borough President’s land use recommendations and a tool for other elected officials, city agencies, community boards, local organizations, and community advocates fighting for change.
It is intended to inform the Borough President’s land use decisions and recommendations, as well as to provide shared data and information to all Brooklyn stakeholders.
Navigating The Plan
Within The 2025 Plan, you will find:
- A Framework identifying what the challenges facing our borough are and where the Plan’s objectives are ost urgent. It defines priority areas, place types, and other common vocabulary, and is divided into four sections:
- Health, Wellness, + Justice
- Housing Growth + Housing Choice
- Jobs, Industry, + Economic Prosperity
- Public Space + Placemaking
- Eight Elements outlining Objectives, Strategies, and Actions designed to advance The Plan’s vision and goals. The Elements are:
- Housing
- Health
- Climate
- Jobs
- Education
- Public Realm
- Transit + Freight
- Community Infrastructure
- An analysis of Existing Conditions featuring over 100 maps analyzing data on everything from street safety and insurance access to street cleanliness, housing growth, and heat vulnerability.
Brooklyn’s First Access to Opportunity Index
The 2025 Plan’s access to opportunity index maps approximate areas of higher or lower opportunity, weighed against five key areas:
- Education
- Transit
- Jobs and Job Resources
- Health and Active Living
- Climate Risk
This analysis helps orient and prioritize policies and investments in Brooklyn.
The neighborhoods with the highest access to opportunity include parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Boerum Hill. Mapping higher-opportunity areas can inform how the borough understands its housing needs and priorities. In many of Brooklyn’s higher-opportunity communities, housing growth has lagged despite strong access to jobs, transit, and essential services – revealing missed opportunities for equitable development. By increasing housing in these areas, more Brooklynites can gain access to resources that promote upward mobility.
Access to Opportunity + Proposed Interborough Express (IBX) Route
Neighborhoods with less access to opportunity include Coney Island, Canarsie, and Red Hook. Understanding lower-opportunity areas informs where deliberate investment is required to address systemic disparities. For example, The 2025 Plan finds that the proposed Interborough Express (IBX) transit line would significantly improve access to opportunity in southern and eastern Brooklyn by providing a more direct link to job centers, educational institutions, and economic hubs. By reducing travel time and connecting historically underserved communities to employment opportunities, the IBX would have a transformative effect on more than 900,000 residents and 260,000 workers who live and work within a half-mile of the line and are currently underserved by our transit system.
Urban Design Typology
Every Brooklynite knows that across and within neighborhoods, there are a variety of different types of places: quiet residential streets, bustling job centers, beloved parks, working industrial zones, and everything in between.
The 2025 Plan makes sense of the different types of places scattered across our borough by creating an Urban Design Typology.
The Urban Design Typology recognizes there is no one-size-fits-all solution for where and how change should happen in our borough and instead offers a new perspective on Brooklyn’s built environment and how people move within it.